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When you think of someone that’s mentally ill, maybe you think of a homeless man on the street, grimy, talking to himself and holding a McCafe cup to get change in. Maybe you think of Elliot Rodgers- sitting in his sunlit car, slowly working himself into a rage towards a camera, and then splashed all over the news the next day as a murderer. Maybe you think of the pretentious emo kids at the base schools, with hair that looks like roadkill, and myspace pages claiming to be “darkness incarnate”. What you probably don’t think of is your classmates, here at TJ. Look around the classroom- statistically, a quarter of the people in here have sat in a chair across from a desk with a shrink on the other side, and learned that by society’s standards, they were untouchables. The stigma of mental health issues affects many, and will undoubtedly affect you at some point in your life. We as a culture need to change that.
Much like physical ailments, there are many different varieties of mental illness. Transmittable sickness runs from the Common Cold all the way to Ebola- and mental illness does as well. There are personality disorders that might affect someone their entire life, making it hard for them to create and keep relationships without help and compassion. Like most chronic physical illnesses, these can be managed with help from doctors and family, but without support can easily turn into something serious. There are also the recurring disorders, like bipolar and major depressive, can be likened to cancer. You can be in remission, but it will come back worse eventually, medication or no. Schizophrenia is like a traumatic brain injury from an accident- something happens that triggers it, you go off the deep end, and you can never be entirely normal again. Like physical ailments, these diseases can be debilitating, but they can be controlled. Also like physical ailments, mental illnesses may preclude normal activity and they may keep people from entirely enjoying their lives, but neither make the sufferer a bad person, and neither changes the humanity of the person inside.